Introduction: the psychic life of digital media -- Where is the writing of digital media? -- Why civilization matters -- Postmodernity and new media -- Conceptual lacunae -- Fundamental challenge to literary theory -- The techne of the unconscious -- The invention of printed English -- How the English alphabet gained a new letter -- What is printed English? -- The genetic code and grammatology -- The ideographic turn of the phonetic alphabet -- The number game in the empires of the mind -- Sense and nonsense in the psychic machine -- Finnegans wake: a hypermnesiac machine? -- Ispace: Joyce's paper wounds -- Schizoprenic writing at Bell Labs -- The cybernetics group -- The psychic machine -- The cybernetic unconscious -- French theory or American theory? -- Lacan reading Poe: "the seminar on "The purloined letter"" -- Les jeux: game and play on the symbolic chain -- The cybernetic unconscious -- Return to sender -- The Freudian robot -- The uncanny in the automaton -- The psychic life of media -- What is the medium of das Unheimliche? -- The uncanny valley -- The neurotic machine -- Minsky and the cognitive unconscious -- The future of the unconscious -- The missed rendezvous between critical theory and cybernetics -- The ideology machine -- Our game with the little "letters."